Ella Koon has parked her website at a ".asia" domain. Edmon Chung, DotAsia's CEO, has been encouraging ".asia" clients to use Creative Commons licenses whenever it makes sense to do so. For Ella Koon, it makes a great deal of sense to release photos with "some rights reserved" instead of "all rights reserved" so that her fans can legally share her pictures and create fan art with them, as long as they attribute the original source. Since she has used a non-commercial license, that means for-profit media can't freely use the photos without permission or (if she demands it) payment, just as in the traditional "all rights reserved." But fans are free to use them as they wish, as long as they don't try to sell them and adhere to the "share alike" requirement and share any new works under the same kind of CC license.

Until now, though, Hong Kong users haven't been able to use CC licenses localized under Hong Kong law. On Saturday that will change with the launch of CC Hong Kong. With licenses adapted by Hong Kong IP lawyers to stand up in Hong Kong court, web businesses like the Hong Kong-based blogging portal MySinablog are getting ready to make them available as a publishing option for their users.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can use Creative Commons or just want to know what's been keeping me so busy over the past few months, please join us for our launch ceremony and festival celebration on Saturday at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon.

Or perhaps a stronger incentive might be a chance to meet CC founder Lawrence Lessig and CC's current CEO Joi Ito? Nutshell schedule:

Full program with a lot more details can be downloaded here (PDF). Maps, directions, and online registration here.

And that's not all: On Friday from 5-6:30pm come hear Prof. Lessig give a public lecture titled: "Free Culture and Free Society: Can the West Love Both?" Lessig has just come out with a new book, Remix.

Another exciting development: DotAsia has just announced a new partnership with Creative Commons to help promote the use of CC licenses in Asia, and to help facilitate more active collaboration between CC-user communities in different Asian countries. A new website, creativecommons.asia, has just been set up. The plan is for the new CC Asia site to serve as a hub and platform for Asia-wide creative collaboration.

Still not entirely sure what CC is all about? Here's a gorgeous new video, "A shared culture" in which CC's founders and key community members talk about the philosophy behind it:

January 24, 2008

For me, the two most thought-provoking sessions at the Workshop on Asia and Commons last weekend were a panel on Saturday afternoon called "Commons: Cultural Perspectives from Asia" and Sunday's final brainstorm discussion. The Creative Commons blog has a good summary of the entire conference, and somebody thankfully wikified the notes from the final brainstorm.

Here's the thing. Creative Commons has become a global movement, with the licenses localized all over the world. But as an organization founded in the U.S., with its international arm based in Europe, the language and approach of "Commons" tends to be heavily legalistic and discussed mainly from the standpoint of Western legal and philosophical frameworks. Many people attending the meeting in Taipei wondered whether Creative Commons in Asia is likely to be more successful as a social movement than as a set of copyright licenses (as Peter Yu has pointed out in the past). There was also a feeling that in order to be truly relevant to the globe, the CC movement's central message needs to undergo a shift that would incorporate more non-Western approaches to the idea of "commons," content creation, and sharing.

Historian Jo-shui Chen was invited to comment on the idea of "commons" in the Chinse cultural context. How should we frame our discussion of "commons" in a predominantly Chinese society in order to increase the chances that Creative Commons will be accepted? Prof. Chen has researched the Chinese concept of "gong" which he describes as "the Chinese notion closest to the Western idea of 'public'." In his abstract he writes:

“Gong” is not a single idea; it is rather a complex of ideas with a history of almost three thousand years. Two fundamental meanings of “Gong” are “government” and “general” or “universal” with the implication of equality. A less prominent meaning of “gong,” which is quite late in origins, is “common” or “shared”.

Chen believes that both "gong" and "si" (meaning "private") are "more about state of mind than separation of spheres," which makes it easier for a person to be both at once in ways that would be confusing or contradictory to Westerners. Also, culturally, he said that "it is difficult for most Chinese to associate themselves with public affairs because they are considered the business of government." He argues that the idea of "public domain" as Westerners would view it is not consistent with traditional Chinese ways of thinking - and that it would be viewed more as a "wilderness" with no inherent order, while at the same time people have a "strong sense of entitlement to resources in this wilderness." He finds that in traditional Chinese social-political consciousness, people perceive public order is as the domain of government. Social activities are organized by gentry, but there is no general idea of public order which is not directly under the control of government.

Given this cultural context, Chen argues that the best way to articulate Creative Commons in Chinese communities is as a kind of public order: "a kinder gentler public order that is good for all...not based upon absolute individual rights, but rather a system that seeks to promote public order and public interest." He concludes that unless CC is framed in this way, "many people with resort to traditional thinking and view the internet as free for all." He also points out that "Individual rights may have been enshrined in law under Western influence, but this idea is very far away from people's real life."

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer of Chinese descent from Bangalore, gave a brilliant talk (I'm told all his talks are brilliant - this was the first time I've heard him speak) titled "How Does An Asian Commons Mean." No, that's not a typo. He points out that "the metaphor of the commons as it is used in debates on information emerges from a specific history of the enclosures movement in Europe." The task of articulating an Asian Commons requires more than merely translating existing initiatives such as Creative Commons, but rather "to answer larger questions of what it means to provide an epistemological account of the commons in Asia." This is especially challenging because the idea that one can consider oneself "Asian" and that such a label has real cultural or social meaning "is a "diplomatic fiction... neither Asia nor commons has any substantive content."

Liang rightly points out that if the "Asian Commons" is merely viewed as a geographical extension of the existing Creative Commons movement, then it has no meaningful role to play because it is pretty much content-free: it merely describes a diverse range of people who happen to be labeled "Asian." The idea of "Asian Commons" only has meaning if it has a substantive global impact on the "idea of the commons." He believes that in discussing Asian perspectives on the commons, we have valuable "opportunities to remove beyond romantic ideals of the commons...move beyond the binary of the debate."

The idea of Asia, Liang also points out, "has often been described in terms or a lack, or a derivative, or of a copy, mimicry... the idea that Asian countries are pirate nations... recycled modern." It's time to move away from this framing.

Furthermore, just as maps don't represent human realities, he argues, nor do legal licenses. "There is a problem with fetishization of licenses" in the Creative Commons movement, he believes. He points to the traditional Indian concept of generosity, which does not involve contracts and precise definitions of property ownership and challenges us to go beyond Western legalistic approaches to consider how the Creative Commons movement can best serve its ultimate goals: maximizing social creativity and learning for the sake of the greater good.

During Sunday's discussion, Isaac Mao raised his idea of "sharism" as a framework for promoting the goals of Creative Commons that is more likely to gain widespread acceptance in Asia, in contrast to Lessig-esque terrms like "free culture." The problem, as Liang pointed out, is that the words "free" and "freedom" have been irreparably polluted by American geopolitics and tainted by perceived agendas of regime change, making anything labeled with those words a hard sell in the developing world. Riffing off the expression "free as in beer," he remarked: "free as in America is unhelpful." There was a widespread sense among people in the room that an emphasis on "public good" and "sharing" will enable the movement to have a much deeper impact, ultimately.

Another thread that came out of the final discussion was that Creative Commons - especially when one emphasizes the movement - provides an opportunity for people in this region to develop and assert alternatives to the copyright regime that the U.S. seeks to jam down everybody's throats. Rather than apologize for being "pirates," and accept the U.S. trade negotiator's premise of "Asia as lacking," why not work to build a model that promotes innovation and shared learning in new, forward-looking ways that will help Asian societies come out ahead in the global knowledge economy?

There are quite a lot of tech startups around the region using open source software and/or Creative Commons licensing, a few of whom are here at the conference. Ellis Wang showed us his EeePC, pictured on the right, a subnotebook computer running on a Linux-based operating system (WSJ has a review of it here). Sean Moss-Pultz discussed OpenMoko, which he describes as the world's first "totally open phone." (Recently Gizmodo wondered whether the iPhone developers borrowed some of their ideas.) We also heard from Takeshi Homma from Sony, who runs eyeVio, a kind of youtube-like video sharing service which uses Creative Commons licenses for user-generated content (see an English-language article about it here).

On Friday night we heard from some independent artists, photographers, and filmmakers who are licensing their works under creative commons and finding it a useful way to get their works seen and known. We'll get a concert later tonight featuring musicians who use CC for at least some of their work.
I will continue posting photos to my Flickr account.

The opening keynote was by Terry Fisher of Harvard's Berkman Center, who discussed his proposed solution to the world's copyright problems, which involves his new company, Noank Media. The company is mainly working in Canada and China right now. More info on how it works here. In China they're working with a company called Felio run by CERNET (the China Education and Research Network), to deploy a legal file-sharing service in Chinese universities. The idea is to act as a broker between producers of creative content and people who want to consume it, compensating producers according to how many people are using their works. I asked Terry how Noank is going to deal with user privacy issues as well as government censorship requirements in China. Regarding privacy, he said "there is no one participant" along the chain of distribution, service providing, and downloading "who simultaneously knows what has been consumed and who has consumed it." Which should protect users from dossiers being kept on them about what films or movies they're watching and listening to. When it comes to censorship, he said that so far they haven't encountered any problems because for now they've only been dealing with music and that censorship questions have not come up. He said he wasn't sure how they will deal with censorship requests if they receive them in the future. But he also said that based on his interactions with Chinese officials, he thinks that there is probably more acceptance in the Chinese government apparatus about the inevitability of open flows of information than one would assume based on current censorship behavior and policy. I'll be following up on that thought in my brief talk tomorrow morning.

July 25, 2007

New virtual real estate is opening up for sale in Asia, as Edmon Chung, CEO of the new ".Asia" top-level domain, puts it. .Asia officially launched here in Hong Kong on Wednesday. They're a non-profit organization whose mission, they say, is "dedicated to the needs of the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific Internet community... providing an online identity for people, organizations, and businesses who want "to express membership in the larger Asian community."

SFgate has a very detailed article about .Asia and its prospects. They describe a launch process which Edmon says he hopes will become a model for future top-level domains:

...unlike previous TLD launches,
DotAsia is setting itself up to take maximum benefit from this
opportunity, while forcing a leveling of the domain-registration
playing field. Rather than simply opening the floodgates for
speculators to register domains -- which makes winning a particular
domain a matter of the fastest finger -- they've laid out a unique
"sunrise" process for the first six months of their operation. After
restricted names are reserved by governments and administrative
organizations, valid international trademark holders and companies
seeking to protect their operating names will have an open window to
submit applications for those respective domains. When conflicts emerge
-- the number of companies that can legitimately claim to have rights
to names like "Sun" and "Star" in Asia is staggering -- verified
stakeholders will have the right to participate in an open,
Internet-based auction, designed to ensure that the entity that values
the domain most will end up controlling it.

The same application and
auction process will be followed for the first 30 days of open
registration as well. Want a nifty generic domain name? Be prepared to
bid on it. How much is porn.asia worth to you?

Before .Asia opens up in phases to governments, trademark holders, and then the general public, they are seeking applicants for their ".Asia Pioneer" program. The idea is to give out premium domain names to organizations, businesses or projects that will help build a quality and diverse Asian Internet community - rather than just selling everything to first-comers and highest bidders. According to the .Asia Pioneer website:

Breaking the mould of disinterested allocation of domains in a first-come-first-served race, the .Asia Pioneer Domains Program entrusts the most prestigious cyber real estate in .Asia to those who show genuine commitment to this community. The objective of the program is to immediately create active and relevant content on .Asia domains for the benefit of Internet users around the world. The program builds on the value of .Asia to provide a natural name for users to easily navigate and find the information they are looking for. Through the Pioneer Domains Program, DotAsia is giving out millions of dollars worth of domain names.

One journalist had some questions about how transparent this process will be. Edmon insists it will be very transparent. It will be fascinating to see what comes out of this process.

At the launch party .Asia had these cute napkins (pictured at right) inviting people to scribble their ideas down and help populate Asia's new cyber-real estate. I actually scribbled down an online media idea (which I'm not showing). Unfortunately I don't have time to implement it this year given my other commitments and I certainly don't have the resources... but maybe somebody else out there might be able to do something with it...